“The problem seems to be that SAP have what they think is a great product, but their customers/potential customers don’t all see it the same way.”

What are the roots of this difference in perception?

SAP’s HANA Vision

The first versions of HANA were focused on analytics, and used for big data “edge cases” that required extreme speed. These typically involved large companies adding an additional HANA server to existing infrastructure to do things that weren’t previously feasible. These use cases can’t really be called “luxury” – they all had hard business cases behind them – but they certainly weren’t for everybody.

“Dior is a stunning work of art and such timeless beauty that almost makes you forget about the price tag. But even though I admire the design very much, somehow I just don’t feel compelled to rush and order one for myself. For the simple reason that I can neither afford it nor (more importantly) do I really need it… Where would I possibly wear it? In case you didn’t get the analogy by now, there are SAP customers that need HANA just like I need a Dior dress, at least at this time.”

From this point of view, HANA will be adopted as the “edge cases” of today become tomorrow’s normal environments, as with some other previous technologies such as mobile phones:

“…the first “bricks” that were an exotic accessory of rich and famous back in the day. But now even some elementary school kids already carry a cell phone to call mom and dad in case a stranger offers them candy. How did we get from there to here? By the means of cheaper and smaller phones, better network coverage and accessibility. Not by worrying about the adoption rates. Not every student or housewife had one of the first cell phones and not every SAP customer is Unilever or Coca Cola.”

But this emphasis on speed has naturally lead customers to assume that if they don’t need — or can’t use – that extra speed, they don’t need HANA. This view has been echoed by other database industry veterans like Doug Henschen:

“Speedy insights are only required when people are actually in a position to do something with them or about them in an equally speedy way. SAP is pushing ahead of the customer’s ability to execute”

“Asking people who don’t own HANA what they think of it, is like asking people who have never driven a car what they think about the speed and handling capability of a Porsche.”

And it’s human nature to assume that something compared to a Porsche is unnecessary, expensive, and limited to a few users.

But when it comes to technology, there isn’t always a tradeoff between better performance and higher costs – especially when radically new approaches are involved. For example, I’m old enough to remember the first arrival of a microwave in our home, and how confused I was as a child who had just learned about energy at school: “wait, it’s much faster to heat food AND it uses less electricity? That can’t be right?!”

“The total cost of acquisition of an in-memory system is likely higher than a storage system. There’s no question. But the total cost of TCO is lower. People cost more than hardware and software – a lot more. So the TCO is lower. Don’t let somebody say to you we can’t go in-memory because it’s so much more money. Acquisition costs may be higher. If you calculate out a TCO, it’s going to be less.”

“Often I have a conversation early on with senior decision makers looking at use cases for SAP HANA in their business. “I hear HANA is expensive”, they say, “talk to me about the price”. Yes – with SAP HANA you store all your important information in-memory, and that’s many times faster and somewhat more expensive than traditional systems.

But there’s two important points: SAP HANA typically processes information an order of magnitude faster than a traditional system, but it is not an order of magnitude more expensive, which means it provides value for money. Second, HANA typically allows you to simplify your IT – and your business. Operational costs are reduced because there is less complexity, and this typically provides an excellent TCO.”

That’s the theory, but it’s clearly not a widespread view among SAP customers today. Might that change in the future?

SAP has published studies showing that HANA can indeed deliver lower costs: a report by Forrester indicates that HANA can save an organization 37% across hardware, software, and labor costs and an IDC study of the HANA deployment of the University of Kentucky indicated an ROI of over 500%.

In addition, many existing customers of SAP Business Warehouse have reported costs savings from moving to HANA among other business benefits:

“Molson Coors has confirmed that development times for new requirements will come in at least 50% less than under alternative configurations. This is because development of BW on HANA reports is much simpler than before… Marketing criticisms aside around ‘feeds’ and speeds,’ no-one should underestimate the value delivers to those businesses that have already invested in SAP BW and still have long life use cases and increased demand from the BW environment.”

One promising sign for SAP is that it’s not only giant companies that are planning to run their businesses on HANA. Smaller companies such as TRCC, with just 500 employees and four full time IT staff are choosing Business Suite on HANA, not because they have exotic needs, but because the system is less complex, with less infrastructure to manage. For them, the “speed increases were just a bonus”

If HANA is becoming an easy decision for greenfield SAP customers, then it can’t really be characterized as a Porsche or a Dior dress – it’s more like the next family car or a pair of jeans. But what if you already have a perfectly good family car?

Is HANA a Fit for All Customers?

Even if Business Suite on HANA becomes a no-brainer for new SAP deployments, what about existing customers?

Real-world organizations already have a lot of complex systems in place. Moving to a new technology — even if it is better and cheaper — imposes real costs. Adopting HANA could indeed be perceived as an unaffordable luxury in this case, and this seems to be the crux of the recent debates.

The company is trying to tackle this by providing ever-more industry use cases and making sure that customers can adopt HANA in steps, with “cookbooks” to help.

It’s also encouraging existing HANA customers share their experiences. The good news for the company is that the earliest adopters of SAP HANA do indeed seem to be generalizing their deployments beyond the initial “edge case” or “luxury” deployments, including Burberry:

Burberry had a positive experience with HANA, according to CTO John Douglas, so it now plans to swap out Oracle database and put the SAP Business Suite on HANA. That work will start with SAP Retail and SAP BW. “We’re now at inflection point where we need a step change to real-time applications,” said Douglas. “It started with customer one-to-one… but now we’re going to put the whole business on one platform, in memory.”

“Besides the acceleration, the user experience improved significantly. We are asked by multiple users for more and more HANA-empowered solutions. It was probably the first time in my role that I really delighted the end-users and made their life easier.” – Thomas Benthien, Global IT Director at Unilever.

And other, more “normal” organizations that have moved to Business Suite on HANA, such as the University of Amsterdam, have reported a positive migration experience.

In addition, the company hopes that an upcoming wave of new “simple” applications, starting with Simple Finance which has been described as a potential “killer app” to entice existing customers to move their core systems to the new environments.

What Does The Future Hold?

“The invitation is for all customers who want to transform their business and capitalize on the opportunities that have been opened up through technology innovation, big data, IoT, cloud, and mobility…deploy HANA. Email us, tweet us, call us…we will help you find the right use case to grow your business faster than your competitors and lower your costs at the same time.”

Will customers continue to assume that HANA will always be too expensive for them to deploy? What if that weren’t true – would it make a difference, or is the real barrier the challenge of doing things in new ways? What could SAP do to persuade the skeptics?

This month we will continue to examine how to ensure the quality of our ABAP coding by beginning to take a look at the runtime analysis tool (SAT). Besides the SQL Trace, the ABAP Runtime Analysis or ABAP Trace is the most important tool to use, if you want to test the performance of your ABAP programs.

Troubleshooting ABAP

SAT is the transaction name of the new ABAPRuntime Analysis in ABAP Tool, which is one of the most significant improvements in ABAP in the NetWeaver 7.0 EhP2. For those of you who are already familiar with the transaction SE30, the former ABAP Runtime Analysis Tool, transaction SAT is the successor of SE30. SAP has completely enhanced the tool with effective new analysis tools and features. The old SE30 transaction offered only two main tools, the Hit List and the Call Hierarchy. SAT offers a rich set of new tools to analyze different aspects of a trace. Some other benefits include a modern UI, new analysis tools, easy navigation between tools…etc…etc. This first blog of the series about SAT gives overview of the most useful SAT improvements (particularly in comparison with the former SE30) and gives a quick ”how to” in order to get you started using this for a runtime analysis of any ABAP application.

Q&A(Post your questions to Facebook or Twitter and get the answers you need)

Q. I tried to read it many times but I am still very confused with it… What is difference Internal and External sessions?

A. OK, let’s go slow.. each logon made through Saplogon creates a terminal session. Within the terminal session you can have up to n (I think it might be 6) external sessions (GUI windows). You can think of each external session as of one GUI window.

Internal sessions are created by the system within an external session, each time a new program is called and its data must be stored somewhere in memory.

Each such program then resides in its internal session. The first one is loaded when you start some transaction, like VA01. Then it can in turn call another program, if it needs, – then the system will create another internal session for that called program (within the same external session = the same GUI window) and so on and so on… This is the Call Stack.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This

THIS WEBSITE USES COOKIES: By clicking "Accept", you agree to the use of cookies and similar technologies to enhance your browsing experience, and analyze your engagement with our content. Read our Privacy Policy.